Math education in the US is pitiful. The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets.
I'm all for teaching arithmetic, but emphasizing the algorithms and how to prove them correct should be paramount. Teaching arithmetic in various bases is important, as should be the basics of numeric analysis. Formal logic should also be a core math subject.
But no, the USA has to teach subjects as were common in the 1920-1950 time frame, in the same manner as back then. This is a consequence of "home rule".
> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts
Did it? My understanding is that it uses a few different approaches to build basic intuition about numbers, and that parents hate it because many of those approaches don't make sense to them, because that's not how they learnt math.
Which makes it an incredibly convenient punching bag.
In PRACTICE it was kids being present with a confusing array of things all at once when they hadn't sorted out the basics, and as a result learning none of them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for my rant about what my son actually went through.
There is an old saying about writing. "Writing is easy, just open a vein and bleed." That particular rant I'm pretty sure that I hit an artery.
Your problems mostly stem from the fact that your son's teacher doesn't know his elbow from his ass, mathematically. Which, given the current climate, is unsurprising, as anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics will run[1], not walk away from a teaching job.
Unfortunately, it's a valid criticism.
More unfortunately, switching to another standard for teaching math isn't going to solve this.
[1] Why be society's punching bag, on the front-lines of an insane litigation and culture war, have your heavily-backloaded pay be contingent on putting up with decades of this kind of bullshit, all while trying to do a mixture of teaching and social work?
>given how many teachers in practice can't tell you whether 3/5 is larger than 2/3
Teaching requirements are NOT standardized at the federal level, and lots of states have decided to just lower standards instead of paying professionals more. If you only hire baby-sitters, don't be surprised when they can't teach simple stuff. In my state, we have high standards for teachers, and every single one, from kindergarten right through high school, from french teacher to cooking to history, could teach a middle school math course.
Your state or municipality cheaping out on your child's education is not the fault of federal regulation, or of a federal curriculum. You'd be whining about the same thing no matter what the national curriculum was, because the problem is that your local governments don't care about education.
> If you're familiar with Glenn Beck's broadcasts, you've no doubt heard about his unhinged crusade against Common Core, including his declaration last week that he will no longer send his kids to college -- Common Core will only indoctrinate them and make them part of "the system that is coming."
> Republicans are taking this all very seriously, with lawmakers in 18 states considering legislation to block Common Core, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) denouncing it on Beck's radio show.
As mentioned in the article there are some actual experts with criticisms to make but many of the people getting unusually upset about it had got sucked into a conspiracy theory.
> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts.
Memorizing facts is the foundation of all learning. When you add 7+7 in your head do you instantly know the answer is 14 because of "understanding" or because you memorized over all the years.
Also the current US education system strictly deemphasizes memorization. Instead it pushes for "understanding" (conveniently a concept that is not measurable).
> Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets.
Ok and?
China and India are producing the smartest people in the world and their education systems strongly emphasize memorization. Understanding comes when you've memorized enough information that you can connect the dots.
Once you get to advanced math it's basically impossible to understand from the start and you can only rely on memorization until you've memorized enough and experienced enough that it finally clicks.
People really underestimate the importance of creativity to advanced technical problem solving. That has been the key human ingredient pushing the frontiers of STEM forward, especially in the most recent decades with better computational tools.
The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer. Engineers aren't calculating anything remotely complex by hand anymore, nor should they. The best scientists also tend not to be people who were problem set whizzes in school.
> The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer.
I'm sorry no. This is simply wrong. Computer proofs are not there yet, and plus, a lot of the interesting theorems (including many of the well-known ones) are non-constructive which are difficult to prove on a computer. In fact, many theorem provers cannot prove 'basic' facts about math due to how constructive proof theory works. Indeed it is not clear what truth means at that level, but considering we regularly use non-constructive proofs to build things, I'm not sure that matters.
I think what is most undervalued is the utility of sheer competence and technical skill to creativity. Without the former, there is no latter. If someone who never studied piano told you they had a beautiful piano solo in their head, would you believe them? More importantly, would you trust them to execute on the creative impulse?
Ask the mathematicians you know whether they do all their work on paper or use maple/octave/mathematica/python. 6/6 that i know do.
If a person who doesn't play piano told me they have a piano solo in their head, i would set them up with a midi sequencer so they can bring it to life. My preconceptions about their capabilities are irrelevant.
> Ask the mathematicians you know whether they do all their work on paper or use maple/octave/mathematica/python. 6/6 that i know do.
If a person who doesn't play piano told me they have a piano solo in their head, i would set them up with a midi sequencer so they can bring it to life. My preconceptions about their capabilities are irrelevant.
A MIDI sequencer is not a piano, and mathematicians typically don't use maple/mathematica/octave/python (unless they're in applied maths, which is a subset of mathematics as a whole).
The most important breakthroughs in mathematics, the kinds of things that push you over the edge as a society and that expand the scope of humanity's knowledge, are at the proof level, which those programs cannot achieve.
Your MIDI sequencer analogy is very apt, because while someone may be able to bang something out on the MIDI sequencer and have the computer play it, a MIDI sequencing is not a human piano performance.
But you're right, if you want a hollow fascimile of the real thing, then yes, those tools could work to impress someone.
Common core standards are pretty good, if you have the chance read into them you'll find you agree with most if not all of it.
It's failing stem entirely from implementation and execution (on every level), leaving a lot of people wondering if general standards top-down are even the solution here, seeing how No Child Left Behind was handled.
Common Core was as much about the "common" as it was about the "core." It's not the previous standards were bad (or even different from current standards) but that there were 50 of them instead of one nationwide.
Which is fine and all, and the national standard was fine, but for some reason, very big houses of teaching material put their dumbest interns on the job and there was A LOT of teaching material that was downright incompetent, and taught nothing. You could see exactly what it was trying to get at but it was obvious the person who wrote that material never understood the underlying concept themselves.
> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts.
In fact, just the opposite. The old math system was rote memorization. Then common core came along and made all those parents and their limited math skills obsolete. It didn't help that teachers who also learned the old math couldn't or didn't understand common core methodology.
BTW, I'm a parent of one those school kids who was trying to learn common core. I got it right away and don't consider myself particularly brilliant. But the grumbling from so many parents who just thought they knew more than the educators was deafening. In the end, the state dropped common core and they are still complaining about it years later. The right made it into a boogeyman and now that and trans kids are all they can fixate on.
The US government is competent but really, really slow, this nativism/anti-immigrant trend will disappear when we actually start falling behind China but that's not for several years.
The unspoken subtext of immigration is that the native culture is failing. Birth rate not at replacement. Not enough educated people. All the BS described in TFA.
Immigration is not just about importing people. It's about importing a culture that is better suited for the demands of your society's ambitions. On the surface it's about bringing in people but really it's about bringing in a people.
Nope, America largely exterminated its native cultures hundreds of years ago. The culture that exists today is the immigrant culture of nation founded on ideas (freedom, slavery, capitalism, democracy) not bloodlines. America can be for anyone who wants to be part of that story.
>this nativism/anti-immigrant trend will disappear when we actually start falling behind China but that's not for several years.
Can you explain the relationship between anti-immigration and manufacturing success? As the sibling comments says, the USA has far more immigration than, well, anywhere in the world.
> As the sibling comments says, the USA has far more immigration than, well, anywhere in the world.
By total numbers, probably. As a % of population, I don't think the US comes even close to the top. Probably even Canada and other North American countries have a even higher percentage, so it doesn't even have the most in North America.
I’m not sure about that compared to other countries, but I’m also not sure why it’d be desirable to have a higher percentage. Seems like it’d be extremely risky to an existing society to even hit something like 33%
The USA has 15.4% foreign-born population. Compared to Asian tech powerhouses, Japan has 2%, South Korea 2.3%, and China 0.1%. And they don't grant citizenship to children of immigrants.
And just eyeballing it, you'll notice most countries demographics don't radically change in the span of a generation.
I'm a big fan of Singapore math. The countries that score top in the world on primary math education use it. In basically every research study that has been done, it works. 3/4 of my children were lucky enough to go to a school that taught it, and it worked well for them.
Unfortunately the US approach has been to throw out every research study suggesting it might work, while failing to fund better studies. See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_sin.... Behind this is that fact that the educational establishment makes a ton of money off of rewriting textbooks and retraining teachers for each reform wave. The hasty changes are guaranteed to lead to disaster, which motivates the NEXT reform wave, which they then also profit on. My mother became a school teacher in the 1950s, and this cycle was ALREADY in progress back then. (Think Sputnik leads to New Math leads to Why Johnny Can't Add, etc.)
Switching to already existing books for an approach that actually will work would be a disaster for the education establishment. And so we'll never do it. No matter how embarrassing our regular (but profitable for the education establishment) disasters are.
Singapore math focuses on teaching every concept by first manipulating physical objects, then manipulating pictures, then manipulating abstract symbols. Encouraging children to draw connections between these.
It also spreads each concept over time so that you keep revisiting the same ideas to ensure it gets fully integrated. And mixes them. So grade 1 kids may be doing "multiplication" by arranging blocks in a grid before they've fully mastered the + sign.
The USA gives a much more cursory pass through operational actions and goes straight to the abstract representation. We also do a lot more of one concept at a time, only to move on to the next while kids forget the first. The result is that kids learn to blindly follow poorly learned procedures, hoping to do it well enough to pass the test before forgetting the concept. And then the following year do it all over again, having forgot the material from last year.
Yeah, yeah, we have an official curriculum, sequencing, and there is lots of verbiage in official documents about how and when kids are supposed to get reminded, etc. But I described what ACTUALLY tends to happen. And you only have to glance at test scores to realize that the official narrative about what is learned is more myth than reality.
That sounds similar to how I learned math in Montessori in Grades 1-6.
Every math concept had physical "materials" that we had to manipulate to get to the answer (e.g. for square root, you place N beads on a grid in a square form and count how many are on the side). Often, tricks to get quickly at the answer were discouraged early on to promote a proper "grasp" on what the operations entail.
I can't speak to the alternatives, but I can confirm that Singapore math is how I learned and it worked really well. Was lucky enough to be homeschooled and my parents did the research to know about it, get the books, and give them to me. Kumquats and mangoes will forever be associated in my mind with elementary math word problems.
A huge systematic problem across all of American society seems to be the prevalence of problems that are profitable to someone. This leads to many cases where people fight reform to maintain some kind of profitable niche in society.
Housing shortages are profitable to property owners, bad rail infrastructure is profitable to airlines, complicated tax codes are profitable for accountants, bad foreign policy is profitable for defense contractors, etc.
All complex societies suffer from this but it seems particularly bad in the USA for some reason.
The combination of "this problem has clear winners" and "anyone can veto any change, but no one can veto the status quo" makes for entrenched, powerful interests.
I suspect that it is particularly bad in the US because our insane vetocracy.
It's bad because of the lack of a fitness function: if we do something inefficiently, but we can afford to pay for it(which we always have, because of resources, having-an-empire, new technologies, etc.), it just keeps going. Once the buck stops, heads roll, and the parts of US history where it got close to that, the textbooks like to say as little about as possible.
So, most of the positive changes we make come from either random whims of the rich: "we can't have that here, my sinuses are too delicate", or moments of revolt that scare the rich into action. But the actions also tend to be random and often go down the authoritarian maintain-status-quo route.
Are there after-school programs that have "Singapore math" or similar in the US?
I've seen the Russian School of Mathematics and I wonder if there are other "foreign" style of math education. If so, I would consider enrolling my future children.
When I grew up, I was enrolled in a bilingual school in middle-school. So I took math in Spanish (following the Mexican curriculum), and in English (following the US curriculum). I thought that was fantastic not because one or other was better (I can't recall) but because it gave different approaches to the same topics.
The problem isn't the how of education. The problem is culture.
We built an actively knowledge-hostile culture that glorifies and rewards managers, hustlers, grifters, and influencers, and we're then surprised that nobody with ambition wants to... Actually build things.
Taking this back to STEM, what is the pay like for FAB jobs? How are employees treated? Hand wringing about math competence ignores whether the jobs themselves are competitive to their peers. If it requires a masters degree in EE, but pays less than a CS degree bachelors on average, the incentives are not going to be there for those that already are generally competent in the sciences.
Employees of Taiwanese fans work insane hours and one of the problems with replicating it here was workers not willing to work the hours that Taiwan did. Don’t know if pay in Taiwan is competitive, but when we’re talking about work/conditions, it should be pointed out.
The United States already has a lot of semiconductor fabs. It was only in recent years that AMD processors fabricated by TSMC overtook the performance of Intel processors fabricated by Intel. Is there something about newer process nodes that makes the employment conditions worse? Otherwise, I'd point to Intel fabs in the United States as an existence proof that the USA can get qualified workers for domestic semiconductor fabrication. (Plus US fabs operated by Texas Instruments, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, and others.)
We were discussing being competitive with peers and what peers are doing vs what we are doing. It seemed pretty relevant.
Also, I mentally separate long working hours from other aspects of “worker conditions.” You can have low working hours but a toxic and unsafe work environment or a physically safe and supportive work environment with long hours. You can also have high and low pay with various working hours (although typically high pay isn’t supported by low working hours unless the business has some sort of massive moat).
I'm saying that I don't know whether employees working insane hours is a necessary or incidental component of the TSMC success story. Up until very recently American fabs were technological leaders with (presumably) less insane hours for employees. My expectation is that American fabs with American-norm working hours would remain competitive as long as they didn't fall behind on node shrinks, which Intel notably failed at in recent years.
Of course it's possible that insane working hours were why TSMC employees got EUV photolithography working at scale before any American manufacturer did. Was that the key difference between Intel and TSMC? It's a question that I personally haven't seen an answer to.
That's a convenient tidbit put forth by who. Reject the premise that "replicating it" requires emphasizing this factor over others. If the true owners of Taiwanese fabs simply took less of the surplus share, the fab could be replicated here by spending more on American workers.
I’m not sure that, in a competitive environment where profit margins are small, that working vast fewer hours is going to beat an aggressive approach like Taiwan’s.
This wouldn’t be a problem, we just let Taiwan work themselves silly why we share in the benefit by getting better and better computer chips, but that doesn’t work if we want to COMPETE with Taiwan in this area.
Friends and family work at the Intel fabs near Portland. They have worse work conditions than software engineers (on-call means you must drive to the fab) but they seem overall happy. They all have Ph.D.s in optics.
This is something that doesn't get enough attention. Youth in North America grow up being bombarded with the idea that becoming a celebrity is the pinnacle of success. Education is often seen as something for conformists. Meanwhile in Asia, children learn from a young age that studying hard and working hard leads to success. Being the smartest in your class is not something to be ashamed of, and not everybody grows up wanting to be a famous singer or athlete.
It's worse than that. Half the politics in this country are actively hostile to education, higher learning, and academics in general. They actively espouse a view that people who are educated are all wrong, and trying to brainwash people. They are dismantling public education in many states, and pushing as many people as possible towards private "schools" and homeschooling that seems to be more about teaching really out of date narratives than any actual education.
There is a very large group of people that when you bring up working hard to be successful they start talking about how you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
I think more-and-more the culture angst isn't against building but rather ownership and equality;
As in, you might be willing to build, but soon you might be frustrated that you don't see much of the fruits of your labor in terms of mobility or rewards.
The pushback against the capitalist class is real and growing amongst the younger generations.
It helps when your society is covered in frescoes and statues that glorify the engineer and the bricklayer...
But when the wastrel of a director is driving a BMW, and you have a ten-year waiting list for a broken-down Lada, you may still feel some resentment against said director.
The 'Rewards' side of things is pretty decent in some parts of STEM, but are rather lousy in others. Hardware work does poorly on this scale.
I agree. Kids are smart (especially the ones who could potentially succeed in STEM). They’re not gonna go all in on math so they can work in a fab from dusk ‘till dawn for mediocre pay.
I worked in semiconductor manufacturing. The hardest stuff is troubleshooting the state of the live system and performing root cause analysis. In my time at Samsung, we politely referred to the facility as "bootcamp for engineers". Indeed, I learned how to troubleshoot incredibly complex systems after just a few months of direct exposure. The #1 skill I learned was to not ever make an assumption about a thing. "Trust but verify" was burned into our souls.
Perhaps the best way to train the next generation is to create actual bootcamps on-site where young professionals get a chance to try and answer questions like "How did lot ABC123 end up with unexpected CU exposure while it was sitting inside a N2-purged storage area?" The only tools they get to use: historical logs of every event that occurred and a copy of grep.
In my experience, the deep PhD-style education was absolutely not essential for the day-to-day. Only a few people need to master the idea. Once the complex academia is converted into a physical reticle or CMP process recipe, you then need an army of people to reliably execute on that standardized vision.
I think someone coming into semiconductor manufacturing would have an easier time if they were dropped right into it on day one. The theory is nice but we found it to be mostly a waste of time when someone from manufacturing was calling us on the phone and complaining about a stuck lot.
Same fab, same experience. I would add that a deep understanding (and ability to explain) statistics was more critical than understanding the underlying device physics for most roles I encountered. Enormous amounts of noisy data, characterizing several hundred process steps, is harnessed to apply massive pressure on engineers to "fix" problems that might just be a statistical blip. Economic stakes of minor yield deviations are so high that you often have to act as if something might be wrong before signals reach statistical significance. I bailed after four years, but it was great experience to start my career.
> Perhaps the best way to train the next generation is to create actual bootcamps on-site where young professionals get a chance to try and answer questions like "How did lot ABC123 end up with unexpected CU exposure while it was sitting inside a N2-purged storage area?"
In other words, apprenticeship. I strongly agree, there should be much more of it in our industries.
Companies used to invest in their workers, but after MBAs convinced themselves that workers are just replaceable cogs, nobody wanted to front that expense, so they've spent the past fifty years crying that colleges don't prepare people for jobs, as if jobs have completely transferable requirements, or as if the point of college is to get a job.
Actually companies stopped investing in workers and outsourced education to colleges because the US courts ruled that aptitude tests (the means by which companies formerly would select people for jobs without requiring college degrees) were racist. While not banning them per se, the decisions made it such that suddenly, businesses could now be held liable if the test produced 'discriminatory' outcomes.
Since then (whether you agree with the ruling or not), companies have been reticent to use aptitude tests. Instead they outsource selection to colleges, which conveniently do the exact same thing as the SC was trying to end. Except now, the companies can foist the cost of training onto the employee, since the expectation was no longer that you could get a job out of high school and learn on the job.
Unfortunately, the case IMO has had deleterious effects. It should have been expected, given the racial dynamics of the time, that any aptitude test may have produced unequal results. However, the proper response is the government improving the education system so that these disparities disappeared, rather than making them illegal.
As this article itself states, if an equal mathematics aptitude test were run today by a company seeking to train up engineers and other STEM-inclined workers, then we would expect the test to produce racially disparate results (because according to the article Asian and white parents, who are better off, invested in private tutors for their children). No company will do this test then, because it will certainly be found to be discriminatory once they get the results back, and suddenly they're potentially on the hook for millions. Thus, companies instead outsource the selection to colleges who suddenly manage to whitewash the fact that the graduates of their STEM programs are disproportionately asian (and to a lesser extent, white).
But this is why apprenticeships are all but impossible in the US. Without the college degree to exculpate you, you will be certainly be found to have discriminatory hiring practices if you are picky with your entrants.
I straddle a unique perspective of North American education. I am the descendant of uneducated farmers, but the son of an engineer. My nerdy father left the small town life to get educated and become an engineer.
Now I live in a family of nerds amidst a sea of extended family who are all rather poorly educated. I watched as my cousins cared more about ski-doos and video games than they did about their math homework. Unsurprisingly, they didn't get far academically and now as they are approaching their adult life, are struggling to be employed and do not like their job prospects, the same as their parents did before them.
Meanwhile, me and my siblings were eagerly pushed to pursue education. Curiosity was ignited at every opportunity to encourage us to think hard and explore big ideas. This has paid off in spades for our family. Innovation, thinking, and exploration are often pre-cursors to success.
Seeing my extended family (and their friends) justify their uneducated views of the world, hearing their bigotry, listening to their hatred against "smart people". It hurts my soul. Knowing that my extended family out numbers my close family 5 to 1 by family size makes me worry about the future of our society.
These ignorant folks are voting with their wallets, ballots, and social media voices. What does that say about the future of North America? What does it say about the changes we need to make to enlighten our people for the future?
You can see both sides - what do you think would be an effective outreach to the rural undereducated population? Snomobile mechanic could be one stepping stone to a technical education, more of that kind of thing?
To me that comment reads as though genetic predisposition has little to nothing to do with it. It's all about nurture; nurturing curiosity, encouraging academic achievement and hard thought. These are in no way genetic traits or predispositions, so please leave the eugenics out of it.
The only part of the article I disagree with is that 'inborn talent' is a major force behind disparities in math ability. While I will grant the existence of superstar prodigies, by far most people 'good at math', including most mathematicians behind most of math's most used fields, are simply those who spent time studying mathematics and taking it seriously.
We often mistake parental investment for 'in-born talent', while both are due to the lottery of birth, calling it 'in-born talent' makes it seem unachievable for others. It's a harder hill for sure, but not insurmountable.
We accept differential outcomes in sports and how genetics plays a strong role there, but we seem utterly resistant to accept it in intellectual pursuits for some dang reason.
I've taught many people to juggle from literally zero juggling experience. Hand eye coordination is not equally distributed among the population, and some people are naturally significantly more talented (and make more progress much more quickly than others. 10X differences are not a joke). I'm not sure why we keep believing intellectual things are any different.
Having gone to school with some exceptionally smart/not-smart people at both questionable public schools and then one of the best universities, the discrepancies there are definitely not just due to parental investment (though I'm not denying that it can play a role)
I don't know, complaining about lack of STEM and throwing in a side-swipe to equity thinking isn't that helpful to answer what we need to run our fabs. In my experience you need a ton of people with practical thinking skills, good work ethic and some hands-on training.
I think you'll find enough nerds to fill the engineering/science pipeline. The real problem is with the broad technical workforce, that needs to be bolstered.
In my experience you need a ton of people with practical thinking skills, good work ethic and some hands-on training.
So you don't think STEM education is important? It seems like you left that out of the list intentionally, but not sure.
If so, also consider not whether it is important to the fabs, but whether it is important to kids who eventually want and need jobs. You probably will be able to kill fabs with the nerds in the engineering/science pipeline, but you are then excluding 95% of the current student base.
Sorry, I was unclear. I think STEM is very important but I don't think we need to force everyone into it. I think there are enough STEM-interested kids that will choose this route, if you start with the assumption "STEM is so important we have to make sure everyone gets some" then you have to answer the question how to make it accessible to everyone. I'm in favor of outreach programs and picking out top performers but I don't think forcing a minimum level of STEMness across all students is wise.
100% agree! We need myriad education options for myriad types of students. But the legit critique of the "equity approach", as is happening in the Bay Area, is that it is you they aren't allowing students to advance in STEM (especially M), even students want to. It is not forcing a minimum level, it is capping max level at a relatively low/mid spot.
it is like not teaching geography. now, i kind of can get behind this thought, as whenever i went into a geography lesson at school, there would be a clunk which was my head falling on the desk into deep slumber - teacher: "somebody wake up hicks", except this was long pre "alien", much less "aliens".
but people should have the chance of being taught these things, or indeed anything. to deny them of this is flatly wrong.
Kids are failing? Lower the bar! Suddenly everyone has "improved". The bureaucrats are happy, the unions are happy, even the parents who don't care about education are happy!
Makes it easier to push for the next part of the bureaucrat's agenda [0] [1] : CRT laced math and computer science education.
The bar for gifted and other enrichment is set so low, it's not going to do much. The push for egalitarianism and inclusion means lowering of standards. It used to be an IQ of at least 125 or so was needed to be accepted for gifted programs. Even then, only a small % of gifted kids actually study math, and of those ,even a smaller % get good enough to become competent engineers. Sorta like high school sports...only a tiny % become pro level.
> At a time when America is desperately trying to re-shore strategic industries like semiconductors, we need a broad workforce with basic numeracy even more than usual. The more we refuse to teach our kids math — not the well-prepared upper crust, but the broad middle of the distribution — the more we’ll be dependent on immigration to run the fabs.
Americans need to readjust their attitude toward math. People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw. There’s no social pressure for the middle/upper middle part of the workforce to bang their heads against it and get good as they can at math.
> People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw.
My undergrad degree was in math, but neither my wife nor either of our (now-adult) kids think they're any good at it. They smile tolerantly when I sometimes shake my head over their seeming inability to grasp — and their evident lack of interest in — what, to me, are simple mathematical concepts.
(Of course, my own higher-math skills have atrophied to nearly nothing after decades of not using them ....)
93 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI'm all for teaching arithmetic, but emphasizing the algorithms and how to prove them correct should be paramount. Teaching arithmetic in various bases is important, as should be the basics of numeric analysis. Formal logic should also be a core math subject.
But no, the USA has to teach subjects as were common in the 1920-1950 time frame, in the same manner as back then. This is a consequence of "home rule".
No arguments there.
> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts
Did it? My understanding is that it uses a few different approaches to build basic intuition about numbers, and that parents hate it because many of those approaches don't make sense to them, because that's not how they learnt math.
Which makes it an incredibly convenient punching bag.
In PRACTICE it was kids being present with a confusing array of things all at once when they hadn't sorted out the basics, and as a result learning none of them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for my rant about what my son actually went through.
There is an old saying about writing. "Writing is easy, just open a vein and bleed." That particular rant I'm pretty sure that I hit an artery.
Unfortunately, it's a valid criticism.
More unfortunately, switching to another standard for teaching math isn't going to solve this.
[1] Why be society's punching bag, on the front-lines of an insane litigation and culture war, have your heavily-backloaded pay be contingent on putting up with decades of this kind of bullshit, all while trying to do a mixture of teaching and social work?
However I stand by my point that Common Core should be described in terms of what it did do, and not what its supporters hoped it would do.
Teaching requirements are NOT standardized at the federal level, and lots of states have decided to just lower standards instead of paying professionals more. If you only hire baby-sitters, don't be surprised when they can't teach simple stuff. In my state, we have high standards for teachers, and every single one, from kindergarten right through high school, from french teacher to cooking to history, could teach a middle school math course.
Your state or municipality cheaping out on your child's education is not the fault of federal regulation, or of a federal curriculum. You'd be whining about the same thing no matter what the national curriculum was, because the problem is that your local governments don't care about education.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rnc-embraces-common-core-...
> If you're familiar with Glenn Beck's broadcasts, you've no doubt heard about his unhinged crusade against Common Core, including his declaration last week that he will no longer send his kids to college -- Common Core will only indoctrinate them and make them part of "the system that is coming."
> Republicans are taking this all very seriously, with lawmakers in 18 states considering legislation to block Common Core, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) denouncing it on Beck's radio show.
As mentioned in the article there are some actual experts with criticisms to make but many of the people getting unusually upset about it had got sucked into a conspiracy theory.
Memorizing facts is the foundation of all learning. When you add 7+7 in your head do you instantly know the answer is 14 because of "understanding" or because you memorized over all the years.
Also the current US education system strictly deemphasizes memorization. Instead it pushes for "understanding" (conveniently a concept that is not measurable).
> Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets.
Ok and?
China and India are producing the smartest people in the world and their education systems strongly emphasize memorization. Understanding comes when you've memorized enough information that you can connect the dots.
Once you get to advanced math it's basically impossible to understand from the start and you can only rely on memorization until you've memorized enough and experienced enough that it finally clicks.
The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer. Engineers aren't calculating anything remotely complex by hand anymore, nor should they. The best scientists also tend not to be people who were problem set whizzes in school.
I'm sorry no. This is simply wrong. Computer proofs are not there yet, and plus, a lot of the interesting theorems (including many of the well-known ones) are non-constructive which are difficult to prove on a computer. In fact, many theorem provers cannot prove 'basic' facts about math due to how constructive proof theory works. Indeed it is not clear what truth means at that level, but considering we regularly use non-constructive proofs to build things, I'm not sure that matters.
I think what is most undervalued is the utility of sheer competence and technical skill to creativity. Without the former, there is no latter. If someone who never studied piano told you they had a beautiful piano solo in their head, would you believe them? More importantly, would you trust them to execute on the creative impulse?
If a person who doesn't play piano told me they have a piano solo in their head, i would set them up with a midi sequencer so they can bring it to life. My preconceptions about their capabilities are irrelevant.
I’m no mathematician, but I’d be very surprised if the overlap these tools have with mathematical research is very large.
A MIDI sequencer is not a piano, and mathematicians typically don't use maple/mathematica/octave/python (unless they're in applied maths, which is a subset of mathematics as a whole).
The most important breakthroughs in mathematics, the kinds of things that push you over the edge as a society and that expand the scope of humanity's knowledge, are at the proof level, which those programs cannot achieve.
Your MIDI sequencer analogy is very apt, because while someone may be able to bang something out on the MIDI sequencer and have the computer play it, a MIDI sequencing is not a human piano performance.
But you're right, if you want a hollow fascimile of the real thing, then yes, those tools could work to impress someone.
It's failing stem entirely from implementation and execution (on every level), leaving a lot of people wondering if general standards top-down are even the solution here, seeing how No Child Left Behind was handled.
Yeah, no disagreement there.
> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts.
In fact, just the opposite. The old math system was rote memorization. Then common core came along and made all those parents and their limited math skills obsolete. It didn't help that teachers who also learned the old math couldn't or didn't understand common core methodology.
BTW, I'm a parent of one those school kids who was trying to learn common core. I got it right away and don't consider myself particularly brilliant. But the grumbling from so many parents who just thought they knew more than the educators was deafening. In the end, the state dropped common core and they are still complaining about it years later. The right made it into a boogeyman and now that and trans kids are all they can fixate on.
Immigration is not just about importing people. It's about importing a culture that is better suited for the demands of your society's ambitions. On the surface it's about bringing in people but really it's about bringing in a people.
Nope, America largely exterminated its native cultures hundreds of years ago. The culture that exists today is the immigrant culture of nation founded on ideas (freedom, slavery, capitalism, democracy) not bloodlines. America can be for anyone who wants to be part of that story.
Can you explain the relationship between anti-immigration and manufacturing success? As the sibling comments says, the USA has far more immigration than, well, anywhere in the world.
By total numbers, probably. As a % of population, I don't think the US comes even close to the top. Probably even Canada and other North American countries have a even higher percentage, so it doesn't even have the most in North America.
I’m not sure about that compared to other countries, but I’m also not sure why it’d be desirable to have a higher percentage. Seems like it’d be extremely risky to an existing society to even hit something like 33%
And just eyeballing it, you'll notice most countries demographics don't radically change in the span of a generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
It has 10x the US per-capita immigration quotas. And it takes less than a single electoral cycle to go from permanent resident to citizen!
Unsurprisingly, the current liberal party in power is very popular among immigrant born population...
Unfortunately the US approach has been to throw out every research study suggesting it might work, while failing to fund better studies. See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_sin.... Behind this is that fact that the educational establishment makes a ton of money off of rewriting textbooks and retraining teachers for each reform wave. The hasty changes are guaranteed to lead to disaster, which motivates the NEXT reform wave, which they then also profit on. My mother became a school teacher in the 1950s, and this cycle was ALREADY in progress back then. (Think Sputnik leads to New Math leads to Why Johnny Can't Add, etc.)
Switching to already existing books for an approach that actually will work would be a disaster for the education establishment. And so we'll never do it. No matter how embarrassing our regular (but profitable for the education establishment) disasters are.
I complain about this occasionally. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 for a more general complaint, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a rant about the Common Core disaster specificially.
It also spreads each concept over time so that you keep revisiting the same ideas to ensure it gets fully integrated. And mixes them. So grade 1 kids may be doing "multiplication" by arranging blocks in a grid before they've fully mastered the + sign.
The USA gives a much more cursory pass through operational actions and goes straight to the abstract representation. We also do a lot more of one concept at a time, only to move on to the next while kids forget the first. The result is that kids learn to blindly follow poorly learned procedures, hoping to do it well enough to pass the test before forgetting the concept. And then the following year do it all over again, having forgot the material from last year.
Yeah, yeah, we have an official curriculum, sequencing, and there is lots of verbiage in official documents about how and when kids are supposed to get reminded, etc. But I described what ACTUALLY tends to happen. And you only have to glance at test scores to realize that the official narrative about what is learned is more myth than reality.
Every math concept had physical "materials" that we had to manipulate to get to the answer (e.g. for square root, you place N beads on a grid in a square form and count how many are on the side). Often, tricks to get quickly at the answer were discouraged early on to promote a proper "grasp" on what the operations entail.
His thinking at least parallels Marie Montessori's. There probably is some direct influence, but I couldn't find evidence of it in a quick search.
However it does not surprise me that the approaches would work out to be similar.
Housing shortages are profitable to property owners, bad rail infrastructure is profitable to airlines, complicated tax codes are profitable for accountants, bad foreign policy is profitable for defense contractors, etc.
All complex societies suffer from this but it seems particularly bad in the USA for some reason.
The combination of "this problem has clear winners" and "anyone can veto any change, but no one can veto the status quo" makes for entrenched, powerful interests.
I suspect that it is particularly bad in the US because our insane vetocracy.
So, most of the positive changes we make come from either random whims of the rich: "we can't have that here, my sinuses are too delicate", or moments of revolt that scare the rich into action. But the actions also tend to be random and often go down the authoritarian maintain-status-quo route.
I've seen the Russian School of Mathematics and I wonder if there are other "foreign" style of math education. If so, I would consider enrolling my future children.
When I grew up, I was enrolled in a bilingual school in middle-school. So I took math in Spanish (following the Mexican curriculum), and in English (following the US curriculum). I thought that was fantastic not because one or other was better (I can't recall) but because it gave different approaches to the same topics.
We built an actively knowledge-hostile culture that glorifies and rewards managers, hustlers, grifters, and influencers, and we're then surprised that nobody with ambition wants to... Actually build things.
Also, I mentally separate long working hours from other aspects of “worker conditions.” You can have low working hours but a toxic and unsafe work environment or a physically safe and supportive work environment with long hours. You can also have high and low pay with various working hours (although typically high pay isn’t supported by low working hours unless the business has some sort of massive moat).
Of course it's possible that insane working hours were why TSMC employees got EUV photolithography working at scale before any American manufacturer did. Was that the key difference between Intel and TSMC? It's a question that I personally haven't seen an answer to.
This wouldn’t be a problem, we just let Taiwan work themselves silly why we share in the benefit by getting better and better computer chips, but that doesn’t work if we want to COMPETE with Taiwan in this area.
Educated people are less likely to swallow corporate and Government bullshit and more difficult to control. Companies call them "overqualified".
As in, you might be willing to build, but soon you might be frustrated that you don't see much of the fruits of your labor in terms of mobility or rewards.
The pushback against the capitalist class is real and growing amongst the younger generations.
It helps when your society is covered in frescoes and statues that glorify the engineer and the bricklayer...
But when the wastrel of a director is driving a BMW, and you have a ten-year waiting list for a broken-down Lada, you may still feel some resentment against said director.
The 'Rewards' side of things is pretty decent in some parts of STEM, but are rather lousy in others. Hardware work does poorly on this scale.
Perhaps the best way to train the next generation is to create actual bootcamps on-site where young professionals get a chance to try and answer questions like "How did lot ABC123 end up with unexpected CU exposure while it was sitting inside a N2-purged storage area?" The only tools they get to use: historical logs of every event that occurred and a copy of grep.
In my experience, the deep PhD-style education was absolutely not essential for the day-to-day. Only a few people need to master the idea. Once the complex academia is converted into a physical reticle or CMP process recipe, you then need an army of people to reliably execute on that standardized vision.
I think someone coming into semiconductor manufacturing would have an easier time if they were dropped right into it on day one. The theory is nice but we found it to be mostly a waste of time when someone from manufacturing was calling us on the phone and complaining about a stuck lot.
There's a book I like called "Stop Guessing" (Nat Greene) about that.
Here's the US Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Guessing-Behaviors-Problem-Solve...
Not affiliated.
In other words, apprenticeship. I strongly agree, there should be much more of it in our industries.
This is the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
Since then (whether you agree with the ruling or not), companies have been reticent to use aptitude tests. Instead they outsource selection to colleges, which conveniently do the exact same thing as the SC was trying to end. Except now, the companies can foist the cost of training onto the employee, since the expectation was no longer that you could get a job out of high school and learn on the job.
Unfortunately, the case IMO has had deleterious effects. It should have been expected, given the racial dynamics of the time, that any aptitude test may have produced unequal results. However, the proper response is the government improving the education system so that these disparities disappeared, rather than making them illegal.
As this article itself states, if an equal mathematics aptitude test were run today by a company seeking to train up engineers and other STEM-inclined workers, then we would expect the test to produce racially disparate results (because according to the article Asian and white parents, who are better off, invested in private tutors for their children). No company will do this test then, because it will certainly be found to be discriminatory once they get the results back, and suddenly they're potentially on the hook for millions. Thus, companies instead outsource the selection to colleges who suddenly manage to whitewash the fact that the graduates of their STEM programs are disproportionately asian (and to a lesser extent, white).
But this is why apprenticeships are all but impossible in the US. Without the college degree to exculpate you, you will be certainly be found to have discriminatory hiring practices if you are picky with your entrants.
Now I live in a family of nerds amidst a sea of extended family who are all rather poorly educated. I watched as my cousins cared more about ski-doos and video games than they did about their math homework. Unsurprisingly, they didn't get far academically and now as they are approaching their adult life, are struggling to be employed and do not like their job prospects, the same as their parents did before them.
Meanwhile, me and my siblings were eagerly pushed to pursue education. Curiosity was ignited at every opportunity to encourage us to think hard and explore big ideas. This has paid off in spades for our family. Innovation, thinking, and exploration are often pre-cursors to success.
Seeing my extended family (and their friends) justify their uneducated views of the world, hearing their bigotry, listening to their hatred against "smart people". It hurts my soul. Knowing that my extended family out numbers my close family 5 to 1 by family size makes me worry about the future of our society.
These ignorant folks are voting with their wallets, ballots, and social media voices. What does that say about the future of North America? What does it say about the changes we need to make to enlighten our people for the future?
We often mistake parental investment for 'in-born talent', while both are due to the lottery of birth, calling it 'in-born talent' makes it seem unachievable for others. It's a harder hill for sure, but not insurmountable.
I've taught many people to juggle from literally zero juggling experience. Hand eye coordination is not equally distributed among the population, and some people are naturally significantly more talented (and make more progress much more quickly than others. 10X differences are not a joke). I'm not sure why we keep believing intellectual things are any different.
Having gone to school with some exceptionally smart/not-smart people at both questionable public schools and then one of the best universities, the discrepancies there are definitely not just due to parental investment (though I'm not denying that it can play a role)
I think you'll find enough nerds to fill the engineering/science pipeline. The real problem is with the broad technical workforce, that needs to be bolstered.
So you don't think STEM education is important? It seems like you left that out of the list intentionally, but not sure.
If so, also consider not whether it is important to the fabs, but whether it is important to kids who eventually want and need jobs. You probably will be able to kill fabs with the nerds in the engineering/science pipeline, but you are then excluding 95% of the current student base.
100% agree! We need myriad education options for myriad types of students. But the legit critique of the "equity approach", as is happening in the Bay Area, is that it is you they aren't allowing students to advance in STEM (especially M), even students want to. It is not forcing a minimum level, it is capping max level at a relatively low/mid spot.
i honestly thought this had to be satire - it seems it wasn't.
but people should have the chance of being taught these things, or indeed anything. to deny them of this is flatly wrong.
Kids are failing? Lower the bar! Suddenly everyone has "improved". The bureaucrats are happy, the unions are happy, even the parents who don't care about education are happy!
Makes it easier to push for the next part of the bureaucrat's agenda [0] [1] : CRT laced math and computer science education.
[0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
[1] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/
> they are doing even more than 12-hour days often
Running the fabs sounds like a shitty job for chumps. Stick to node.js.
Americans need to readjust their attitude toward math. People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw. There’s no social pressure for the middle/upper middle part of the workforce to bang their heads against it and get good as they can at math.
My undergrad degree was in math, but neither my wife nor either of our (now-adult) kids think they're any good at it. They smile tolerantly when I sometimes shake my head over their seeming inability to grasp — and their evident lack of interest in — what, to me, are simple mathematical concepts.
(Of course, my own higher-math skills have atrophied to nearly nothing after decades of not using them ....)